ABSTRACT
Empiricism rules out the contribution of the subject in perception, comprehension and learning. In education the effect of empiricism was to enforce a rigid distinction between the philosophy of knowledge and the psychology of learning. Marc de Mey traces four stages in the development of the cognitive view. The first is the monadic, in which information is assumed to consist of small, self-defining pieces. In the second, structural stage, scientists attempted to define the way individual 'bits' of information might combine in more complex structures. In the third, the contextual stage, they began to recognize that meaning depended on the provision of a suitable context. In the final cognitive stage it was recognized that modelling the visual recognition of even the simplest objects required a total world-view. However, the way people understand the world is both intentional and hermeneutical; the schemata of our understanding are formed as a result of an 'effort after meaning' and by a process of interpretation.
